Contemplative

“We children of God have to be contemplatives.” (Saint Josemaria).

The Betrayal of Christ (Guercino)

I am a wife, mother, daughter, sister, cousin, aunt and friend.  I run a business, work, socialise and pray.  I blog in my spare time.

This is my life.

I have been thinking about how my life would look if I were to try to separate my spiritual life from my life of work and family and socialising.

For me – it would not work.  There can be no separation between all the aspects of my life.  In fact, my life is for God and within my life are all the elements that – I hope and pray – I can use for His glory to make Him happy.

I have been thinking about how this impacts my prayer.

Prayer is such a strange thing.  It can be formal and set and it can be so informal that there is almost no guidance on it.  Sometimes, my prayer is so informal it is literal silence.  I literally silently listen to God.  I empty my mind and list to whatever He wishes to say to me.

Saint Josemaria said, “We children of God have to be contemplatives.”

And this is something to think about because there is opportunity to talk to my Beloved in all parts of my life if I can focus on Him and try my best to remain sinless…

The catch to this sort of life is when I put myself into sin or near occasions of sin.  In those cases, when I am not able to remain sinless and true to God instead of using my energy to focus on Him as I spend my day, I spend it focusing on sin and drawing myself and my activities further away from God…

There is a way to find God in the world that we live in.  Saint Josemaria used to advise university students to “materialise” their spiritual life.  And what he meant by this is that they needed to guard against the tendency of separating their spiritual and physical lives.  He wanted to be sure that they could understand the importance of weaving their lives in with God’s plan for them.  And I can understand this advice.  You see, if we are to separate our spiritual and material lives, then we have a tendency to hold ourselves back from God in one part of our lives.

I remember a colleague of mine telling me that she was embarrassed to attend Holy Mass with her friends who she went out clubbing with because she did not want God to see what she had done at the clubs.  I remember laughing – in a friendly way – with her at how ridiculous it was to assume that God could only see what happened in His Holy Church and was somehow blind to what happened in a nightclub.

And remembering this story with a laugh I am convinced that the only way for me to please my Beloved is to be a contemplative.  And to combine my spiritual and material life…

For with prayer, I stand on Holy Ground where everything is clear. Here. At the Foot of the Cross.